KiteShip

The California Clean Tech Open, a competition in which participants created technology-enabled, environmentally friendly products and business models, announced its five winners this week in San Francisco.

The transportation category winner was KiteShip, which has created giant kites that can help pull commercial ships.

According to KiteShip, nearly 2 billion barrels of heavy fuel oil are burned each year by ship fleets worldwide, creating three times the atmospheric pollution from all the cars on the planet combined. KiteShip's kites are designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as ship fuel costs by 25 percent.